I came home and started cooking. Not because I was hungry. Because I wanted to stand for a while. Cooking and doing dishes, listening to audiobooks.

(This is probably the third time I’ve listen to Bujold’s Memory this year. I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to it in my life now. Or how many times, in addition to that, I’ve read it.

That trilogy–Memory, Komarr, and A Civil Campaign–is some of my favorite stuff of the Vorkosigan Saga. I usually start with the two novels inside Cordelia’s Honor: Shards of Honor, Barrayar; then the stuff of Young Miles: Warrior’s Apprentice, Mountains of Mourning, The Vor Game; then skip all the way up to the trilogy. Once in a while, if I feel like it, I’ll read or listen to stories before, between, and/or after. But it’s mostly those five.)

Oh, but . . . To stand and be silent, after sitting all day, sitting just so, and talking. Talking, talking, talking. Starting at 9:20, going till 5:05, with a twenty minute lunch break.

All the rest was Voices, and all of them mine. Voices till my face was numb.

It was wholly absorbing. I really like doing secondary world fantasy; it’s my happy place.

First loves, you know.

And all the while, that slight anxiety over the choices I’m making, wanting to serve the writer, the readers, wanting to please EVERYBODY.

Knowing it’s not possible.

But how happy it made me to come home, do some dishes–scrub the burnt black crust in my crockpot from yesterday’s Near Disaster (curried yellow split peas in a tomato base–mmn, diced, with green chilis, and garlic, onion, and lemon)–and settle in to make a coq au vin.

Why? Why, because recipes are soothing! Chopping things up is soothing, and to the sound of this story I know so well, which is so impeccable that I suck the sentences of it, the world-building, the structure, the beloved characters who are, at this moment in their timelines, experiencing profound change in their status quo. Their lives. It’s delicious. Like coq au vin.

Not to mention that, now, I’ll have dinner tomorrow night upon coming home, and no need to go about COOKING it.